Memory, Reminiscence, and the Pull of the Past Theme Analysis

“Greasy Lake” is set in the past: it’s a story from the narrator’s memory, and there is a distance between the older narrator who tells the story and the younger version of himself who is at the story’s center. This distance is evident from the way that the narrator’s over-the-top tone seems to mock his younger self and his friends, as well as through the narrator’s perspective on the night’s events. For instance, he doesn’t just say that he dropped his car keys; he describes dropping the keys as his “first mistake,” suggesting consequences to come. The narrator has clearly spent a lot of time thinking through that moment, or else he wouldn’t have been able to diagnose dropping the keys as his “first mistake.” At the same time, the urgent clarity of detail throughout the story emphasizes that even though this moment is far in the narrator’s past, he still lives with it. The visuals and visceral feelings of the night at Greasy Lake leap off the page—the narrator’s fear as he drops his jingling car keys into the dark grass; The Fox’s “tainted” red toenails, which provoke the narrator and his friends to attack her; the narrator’s horrific discovery of the dead body. As all of this hyper-vivid detail builds and builds, the story suggests that the memory of this night has come to consume the narrator, even in his adulthood—the detail is so vivid because the narrator has relived it, powerless to change it, over and over.

In the story’s concluding paragraph, the narrator hovers even more sensuously over every detail surrounding his final moments at Greasy Lake, describing the lingering specter of the strung-out girl reaching for the narrator and his friends as they drive away. This is the very kind of girl the narrator and his friends had hoped to meet at Greasy Lake, but she is now made horrific in the light of day, just as the entire incident is made horrible for the narrator in the bright clarity of his adult memory. The narrator recalls “inch[ing the car] forward with a groan, shaking off pellets of glass like an old dog shedding water after a bath,” and he remembers “a sheen of sun on the lake.” The specifics of the narrator’s memory of this experience are intense and vivid, which makes clear that this night, more than possibly any other night of the narrator’s life, has made him into whoever he might be in the present day.